If Trump fired Comey to impede the Russia investigation, he possibly engaged in obstruction of justice. That is a crime. That is a case for impeachment. In fact, the first of the three articles of impeachment filed by the House judiciary committee against Richard Nixon in 1974 was for obstruction of justice.

By firing Comey, Trump has created the biggest political crisis in American politics since Watergate. The Democrats have very few weapons to wield against Trump right now, but they can continue to poke and prod him, using the ensuing controversy to rally opposition to Trump. American democracy is in real danger, and the Democrats now have a duty—one that transcends partisan politics—to make those stakes clear to the electorate.

Senate Russia investigators have sent a request to the Treasury Department’s criminal investigation division for any information related to President Donald Trump, his top officials and his campaign aides, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee told CNN Tuesday.

Pretty good overview. My takeaway is that it’s unlikely to be anything other than impeachment, which would require Dem control of the House, and theoretically a supermajority in the Senate. This was kinda great though:

The White House maintains that it was unaware of any links to the Kremlin, and the details of the investigations are classified. But select members of Congress who oversee the intelligence agencies have access to the findings. Recently, one of them, Senator Mark Warner, of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, privately told friends that he puts the odds at two to one against Trump completing a full term.

“This confirms all of my suspicions about unjustified, politically motivated government surveillance,” Page said in an interview Tuesday. “I have nothing to hide.” He compared surveillance of him to the eavesdropping that the FBI and Justice Department conducted against civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

Super-deep dive on Felix Sater. Shows how far back the Trump-Russia stuff goes.

Our investigation also may explain why the FBI, which was very public about its probe of Hillary Clinton’s emails, never disclosed its investigation of the Trump campaign prior to the election, even though we now know that it commenced last July. Such publicity could have exposed a high-value, long-running FBI operation against an organized crime network headquartered in the former Soviet Union. That operation depended on a convicted criminal who for years was closely connected with Trump, working with him in Trump Tower — while constantly informing for the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ), and being legally protected by them.

There are no names of either individuals or organizations mentioned in the documents. WikiLeaks claims to have made 70,875 redactions in the “Vault 7” files. This is an amazing number, which raises two related questions. First, Assange has always been against redactions, often quarrelling with news organizations that have partnered with WikiLeaks in the past over their insistence on protecting the identities of individuals. What made him change his policy? Also, by all accounts, including Assange’s, WikiLeaks has limited resources and very few employees, certainly nowhere near enough to carry out 70,875 redactions – if that figure is even accurate. All this indicates that either the source (and in this case it wouldn’t have been one former disgruntled government employee) or some other well-funded organization, probably an intelligence agency, have been working on these documents for quite some time.